Re: Newbie question list: Was The perverse vibe of lua-l

[Tony Finch <dot@...>]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, Peter Cawley wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:21 AM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> > Hmm, still, his use of "recursive" doesn't seem to make any sense...
>
> I think his point was that the definition of the class of regular
> expressions is recursive,

Yes. That is, the syntax of regular expressions themselves is recursive,
but regular expressions cannot be used to parse recursive syntaxes. So
you can't use a regex to parse a regex.

(Unless, like Perl, your regexes are so enormously distended that they are
well beyond being regular.)

Tony.
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